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‘…one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.’ - Vladimir Nabokov
This section provides recommendations for novels, plays, poetry, and critical works to help you explore and understand the breath of the literary world.
Book Recommendations
Albert Camus’ The Fall: presents the absurdity of life through a hedonistic, immoral man.
An amalgamation of all there is to know about the human condition. From patricide, free will, sin to moral responsibility.
Travel through the psyche and inner thoughts of different characters, exploring the themes of perception, time, and the nature of art.
Explores the meaning of life and the absurdity of existence through equivocal language, a recursive temporal structure, and absurd interactions.
One young woman’s ascent to the top of England’s shallow upper-class society, along with her rapid descent. A coruscating social criticism, revealing the folly of society.
Explores the dynamics of marriage and social class in 19th-century England. It highlights the importance of determination despite an apocalyptic atmosphere of change and uncertainty.
Debates concepts of justice, purpose, action and inaction, responsibility, and revenge.it reveals the complexity of human nature and the struggle to understand others and oneself.
Demonstrates the depths of human apathy as the main characters, Meursault, is put on trail for the murder of a man. Explores the notions of what is certain in life (only death) and the absurd nature of our existence.
Reveals the inherent paradox within society by suggesting the way thing appear is not necessarily the reality. It explores the possibility of resurrection on an individual scale and societal level.
A tragedy revealing the danger of intense passion and neglecting one’s duty. It explores gender roles, power, strategy, manipulation, decadence, honour, loyalty, and the use of omens.
Through presenting an oppressive bureaucracy, Kafka highlights the notion of the absurd - via an absurd legal system - and the individuality of existence.
Follows the lives of several characters as they struggle to navigate the harsh realities of a society becoming more divided and advancing at too great a rate. Explores the themes of fact vs. fancy, unhappy marriages, morality, industrialism and its evil, and femininity.
Reveals the clash between good and the real by introducing ‘the ideal man’ into society and observing what happens. Reveals the ambiguous nature of what is considered ‘good’, and how this is easily inverted and manipulated to bring destruction.
Explores the essence of isolation and the earning for human connection. It speaks of loneliness and unrequited love, and they way each person is part of an interconnected nexus of others.
This novel acts as an experimentation with time. It is a mingling of present experience and memory. Woolf's style adds emphasis to her idea of time as a constant flow—time that is the present but also the past; linear but sporadic; eternal but vanishing.
As a poet in the Elizabethan period, Sidney focused his writing on religion, philosophy, and imaginative poetry. He claims poetry could not exist without nature and defends that poetry is the the best forum of understand what should be.
A retelling of the the story of Adam and Eve from the biblical book of Genesis which describes the creation of Heaven and Earth and of Adam and Eve. Milton confronts in his writing is the questions of free will or predestination, or whether or not humans make t heir own choices or whether they are fated.
A collection of fifteen short stories, presenting a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The collection addresses the conflicts of interpersonal relationships, religious tension, and political concerns of the time.
A gothic novel that follows the antihero, Heathcliff as he gets revenge on the people who kept him away from his love, Cathy Earnshaw. It represents human nature at its darkest , showing the fatal and selfish side of love .
In The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, Webster explores power, love, sex, and corruption in the Italian court. In The Broken Heart, John Ford questions the value of emotional repression as his characters attempts to subdue their desires and hatred in Ancient Greece.
A compelling novel that follows the journey of an independent and passionate protagonist, Lucy Snowe, as she navigates love, loss, and personal growth in a foreign land, ultimately funding her voice and purpose.
The Rape of the Lock serves as a coruscating social criticism to reveal the folly and absurdity of society. The poem tell of how the Baron sneakily cuts off a lock of Belinda’s hair at a party, such is enough to cause her to become agitated enough to start a fight.
Tells the story of a young, beautiful man who trades his souls for eternal youth, then descends further and further into a moral abyss - until he discovers there is, after all, a price to pay for his actions. It explores themes of morality, vanity, and the corrupting influence of pleasure and beauty, and is frequently analysed as a gothic cautionary tale.
Hardy’s poetry explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, tagged landscape of his native Dorset. He rejected the Victorian belief in a benevolent God, and much of his poetry reads as a sardonic lament in the bleakness of the human condition.
Pygmalion is about Henry Higgins, a linguist and professor, who is inspired by a bet with his colleague to teach a flower girl from the streets how to speak and bah e properly in order to navigate the upper class. Its moral is that life is too realistic to believe in the fabrication of idealism.
A novel about a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian-era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a humorous critique of English society at be beginning of the 20th century. The ‘room’ can be seen as a person’s life and the view can be seen as their particular world view.
The Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect and struggles to adjust to this condition. It touches in themes of alienation, absurdism, transformation, and familial relationships.
The story concerns a visit by the devil and his entourage to the officially atheistic Soviet Union. The devil, manifested as one Professor Woland, challenges the Soviet citizens' beliefs towards religion and condemns their behaviour throughout the book.
Recorded in Freud's 1918 text From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, the case study of Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff, “the Wolf Man”, is an account of a complete analysis from first diagnosis to cure and was intended by its author to demonstrate the validity of psychoanalytic theory. Freud wanted to try to explain and treat Wolfman's psychological problems through dream analysis.
The play follows a host of Spanish and English characters navigating love, lust, and families. The play is set in mid-1600s Naples during the banishment of many pro-monarchists from England. Two key themes in The Rover are violence and class.
The dangers of excessive ambition and the apparent compulsion to strive for more than one already has forms a major theme in Marlowe's plays. Marlowe's work is known for its blank verse, rich imagery, and often grandiose themes exploring ambition, power, and the nature of good and evil.
Keats wrote with great insight and emotion about art and beauty, love and loss, suffering and nature. His famous poems include 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'. He focused on the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of human life in time.
A novel written in blank verse which tells of the heroine's childhood and youth in Italy and England, her self-education in her father's hidden library, and her successful pursuit of a literary career.
Describes the order of the universe in terms of a hierarchy, or chain, of being. By virtue of their ability to reason, humans are placed above animals and plants in this hierarchy. Man has a mixed nature, in which self-love and reason can lead to virtue. However, both self-love and reason can also lead to vice.
The poems in the collection Songs of Experience contain themes of poverty, misery, loss of innocence, corruption of childhood, death, and restrictions imposed by authorities.
Volpone (The Fox) is a Venetian gentleman who pretends to be on his deathbed after a long illness in order to dupe Voltore (The Vulture), Corbaccio (The Raven) and Corvino (The Crow), three men who aspire to inherit his fortune. Thematically, the play Volpone is all about greed. Every action of the characters Volpone, Mosca, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino is motivated by greed.
Byron's epic satirical poem in which he takes his own life as a wandering womanizer and flips it around, making his hero seduced by lots of women. Love is a source of pleasure and of pain in the poem.
The novel follows the often difficult relations between the English and Indian communities in an Indian town in the later days of the British Raj. The novel looks at racism and colonialism, as well as a theme that Forster explored in many of his earlier works: the need to stay connected to the earth while also living in your head.
An epic poem by Edmund Spenser that tells the allegorical tale of six knights on a quest for virtue. It delves into themes of chivalry, morality, and the power of good over evil.
It deals with events of the early 6th century and was probably composed c. 700–750. It tells the story of the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, who gains fame as a young man by vanquishing the monster Grendel and Grendel's mother; later, as an aging king, he kills a dragon but dies soon after, honoured and lamented.
A poem that demonstrates God created the heavens and Earth for men to enjoy. It serves as not just praise for the Creator, but thanks for the world given to humanity.
The main themes of 'Goblin Market' include temptation, sacrifice, and redemption. These themes are explored through the fateful encounter of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, with goblin merchants.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an Arthurian legend about a knight who goes on a strange quest. At the beginning of the story, the Green Knight appears at King Arthur's court and offers a challenge: Sir Gawain may strike one blow against him (chopping his head off), but that blow will be returned one year later.
Arnold’s poetry explored isolation and conflict with a dark and difficult world through themes like loneliness and isolation, classical characters and ideas, and the flaws of modern life (like its materialism).
The novel focuses on the events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations with his relationships with other men in his life, particularly an Italian bartender named Giovanni whom he meets at a Parisian gay bar. The themes or central ideas of the novel have to do with David's character: his sexual identity and guilt and his isolation from others. David falls in love with Giovanni, and though he tries to hide his feelings, it is at Giovanni's room where he feels most at ease.
Describes the terror of a wild horseback ride and the mental and emotional transformation that the rider and the speaker go through as she faces death. The poem begins with a calm “stasis” in which nothing is happening until the horse, “Ariel,” throws herself headlong into a charge.
Various European powers are exploiting Africa for its riches and resources while leaving little or nothing to the Africans who are laboring under them. Through Marlow, Conrad shows the horrors of colonialism and concludes that the Europeans, not the Africans, are the true savages.
Written in epistolary style, the novel is based on a story about a servant and the man who, failing to seduce her, marries her. Pamela Andrews is a 15-year-old servant. On the death of her mistress, her mistress's son, “Mr. B,” begins a series of stratagems designed to seduce her. It demonstrates that the value of virtue is both spiritual and material, with the concrete rewards of wealth and status representing the less tangible but even more important spiritual benefits of virtuousness.
A story focused on connection, class relations, literature as an art form, and Edwardian life. The narrative concerns the relationships that develop between the life-loving Schlegel family, and the seemingly cool and pragmatic Wilcoxes.
From post-structuralism, to eco-criticism, to psychoanalytic theory, Beginning Theory explores the polysemic nature of texts and the intiriguing ambiguity of critical appraisal. It will give you the tools to think laterally and analysis Literature in varying ways.
A text that explores all things poetry in a fun and witty manner. It explores the key aspects of what makes a poem: metre, rhyme scheme, form, and diction. It also has exercises you can complete to consolidate your reading.
Famously, not much happens in this book, yet all of life is contained in its pages. In terms of plot, the novel depicts the events of one day (June 16th, 1904) in one smallish European city (Dublin, Ireland) through, mostly, the consciousness of two men (Stephen Dedalus, 22, and Leopold Bloom, 38). Only nineteen hours pass.
The novel is set on Egdon Heath, a fictional barren moor in Wessex in southwestern England. The native of the title is Clym Yeobright, who has returned to the area to become a schoolmaster after a successful but, in his opinion, shallow career as a jeweler in Paris. It is fatalistic, presenting the timelessness, forces, and indifference of nature as compared to the ups and downs of transient human lives and experiences.
A metatheatre play that features a group of six characters who claim to be fictional creations from an abandoned work. The Characters interrupt a company of Actors during a rehearsal and implore the Director to stage their story. As a piece of absurdist drama, it explores the nature of art and the relationship between fiction and reality.
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